Tracing Your Paths
| Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 | --jr |
On-line Maps have been making a great deal of news lately, and I've learned a few things about them. One of the ones that I've always wondered about was how catographers figured out where the streets were (and why some of the streets were a tad off when you looked at the Hybrid View in some remote area. ) Well, one of the reasons I learned was that many of these maps were outlined by hand. (Proving the magician's adage that just because something's really hard and beyond the scope of folks to think possible to do, doesn't mean it's impossible.) Maps, it turns out, are generally traced by folks paid very little to do that tracing. While the process does catch big flaws, it occasionally misses the little ones.
Well, turns out as well that there are a lot of folks very interested in doing that sort of tracing as volunteers and they do a remarkably good job of it. The problem with doing this before was that often the satellite source pictures were as restrictively controlled as the map information they were trying to duplicate.
I'm really sorry I missed out on this announcement earlier. This is fantastic news for folks interested in getting their roads back.